Housekeeper Daniel Gonzales, who was working on a nearby ward but sometimes helped with the breakfast service in Mrs Blaber’s ward, said: ‘Apparently the patient, who had Dementia or something like that, took it and drank it.

Giving evidence, he suggested it may have been to ‘worry’ staff into taking safety seriously.

Codes for secure storage cupboards where chemicals were kept were sometimes written on the wall next to them, he said, although he did not believe this was the case in Mrs Blaber’s ward.

Asked how he thought Flash was found in a patient’s water jug, he said: ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me and my colleagues. We have been talking about it.

‘No-one would pour the product into a jug you normally use for patients.’

Cleaner Ashley Le May had to carry a container of Flash through the wards but ‘at no point did it leave its cardboard box’ he told the inquest (Picture: PA)

Daniel Gonzales was a housekeeper at the Royal Sussex County Hospital when Joan Blaber was a patient and said he had hear another patient had also drunk cleaning fluid (Picture: PA)

He said there were strict rules for staff about using cleaning products, and if they made a mistake they would have ‘definitely’ have lost their job.

Senior coroner Veronica Hamilton-Deeley said the revelation was ‘worrying’ because it meant the incident involving Mrs Blaber was ‘highly unlikely’ to have been an accident.

The hospital had a system of using different types of water jugs to identify the needs of patients.

On the day Mrs Blaber drank the liquid, she was given the wrong colour jug, the inquest previously heard.

Relatives told how a housekeeper took away Mrs Blaber’s clear water jug in the afternoon and replaced it with a solid green one with the same colour lid shortly after – meaning no-one could see the liquid inside.

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Mr Gonzales said there were often not enough water jugs for each patient.

Meanwhile, cleaners employed by the agency Green Mop claimed they were not given formal training by the hospital during their shifts.

Doctor Alex Harrison, an intensive care consultant at the hospital, said Joan was already in the ‘last year of her life’ (Picture: PA)

Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton (Picture: PA)

Ashley Le May, who was part of a team tasked with cleaning communal areas on the day in question, said he had to carry a container of Flash through the wards to get to other parts of the building as it was too big to fit on the trolley. But they were told not to clean the wards.

Giving evidence, he added: ‘At no point did we stop and at no point did the bottle of Flash leave its cardboard box.’

The protocol was to keep chemicals in cupboards and decant into a bucket as necessary, the inquest heard.

Mrs Blaber could have lived a few months to a ‘couple of years’ longer if she had not drunk the detergent, consultant pathologist and medical examiner Doctor Mark Howard estimated.

But Doctor Alex Harrison, an intensive care consultant at the hospital, said she was in the ‘last year of her life’.

The inquest, taking place at the Jury’s Inn hotel near Brighton Station, continues on Thursday.